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Assassin’s Creed III done released a big pile of video last night, along with four new screenshots. There’s a silly CGI trailer that helps no one, but also a great big chunk of in-game footage that shows off the sneaky, jumpy, stabby and animal-hurty ways of a far more rural Assassin, and then some of the ship combat. Click on the pics for bigger versions, and see the trailers below.

First of all there’s a completely pointless CGI trailer that tells us nothing useful whatsoever, but sure looks pretty, and importantly, features exactly no sexy nuns:

It’s “whom”.

But rather more usefully, there’s seven minutes of in-game footage. Look out for the main star, the wobbly hood:

It really is defiantly not in a big city, isn’t it? Combat doesn’t look very contacty, but certainly seems to offer lots of variety. Although for me this looks primarily to be a tree climbing simulator, and for that I want it bad.

And then there’s this:

Boats! Fighting! Coo! Journalists hollering like Justin Bieber fans! Claimed to be released on the 31st October this year, the John Walker Principle puts that somewhere around February 18th, 2013.

I reckon it will be like Den Defence in AC Revelations or Da Vinci’s special missions in ACB where they aren’t one off but its optional and most likely you will only have to do this type of mission once and the rest you can decide if you want to or not

So, we have in-your-face pro Americana jingoism(a fucking bald eagle, really, ubi?), an absence of stealth, a protagonist with ludicrous attire and, most importantly, tree branches with snow stuck to them with wonder glue. Can’t say I look forward to this one.

On a related note, I’ve just begun playing AC II and it is mind numbingly tedious and boring. All missions seemingly involve running up to the target, going stabby stabby on him and then fighting your way out. The first is objectively a better game than this one.

I think I liked the themes of Altair ( unlearn yourself to master yourself, rid yourself of pride and foreknowledge ) much better than Ezio ( They KILLED MY FAMILY [ I also make the ladies wet ] ) and for that alone I was able to believe the story in AC1 more.

I felt the core concept of AC1 was better. The focus on infiltrating a city, gathering information on your target and then taking him out was really interesting; the failure was only in the execution. With AC2, the went in a totally different direction and turned it into a medieval GTA, rather than the medieval Hitman that it was.

So while I wouldn’t toss around terms like ‘objectively better’, I much preferred the promise of AC1 to 2.

I find it weird if someone does not find it disturbing. The world needs to be dynamic in orded for this game to work and it didn’t seem dynamic at all. Its not like moving branches are out of the reach of current physics engines. Dont know for consoles though. Combat seemed also akward at some parts, but maybe its gonna get polished later. Not sure if looking forward to this at all, which is sad :(

Oh I don’t know, they managed to get the 100% historically accurate Outboard motors onto the ships, as well as the power steering and explodey roundshot cannon balls. Admittedly it does seem they’ve had to cut the seven foot american sailors who simply threw cannon balls at passing enemy ships, but I suspect that’s down to the need to save on pixels for the consoles. After all those men used to light the fuses for their explodey round-shot cannon balls with the stubble on their chins, and with each bit of stubble also needing the likeness of one of the found fathers carved into the end by nanites (which Benjamin Franklin invented) the graphical fidelity required would simply be too much for the consoles to handle.

Sadly it does seem like they speed up the whole naval combat quite a bit, while turning down on crew members, realism while pouring extra explosions etc over the whole thing, but expecting anything else from an AC game is probably too much.
Not that it didn’t looked exciting, it certainly did, and this is still the first AC game that has gotten me interested despite these ‘flaws’.
I’m one of those who actually enjoyed the naval combat of Empire TW so I was kinda hoping of something along those lines, but this’ll have to do.

But it did look exciting, you have to give them that. And you did. I think we can all agree that game play trumps realism near every time. Naval combat games are generally fun, except for all those bits where you’re sailing forever and not fighting anything. Or worse still, waiting on wind to blow.

Either way this is one of those instances where I will take the outboard motors on the boats…too much down time in a game like this is bad thing, I think.

Now, if only more open world games could incorporate parkour movement through their cities and forests with sailing ships between locations, naval combat and exciting – or reasonably exciting – combat the Sandbox genre might really take off. So yeah…more of all of this, please. You can leave the plot at home and just build the world and the features in fact.

I didn’t say anything about historical accuracy as AC series has nothing of it. Still I can’t imagine anyone apart Englishmen and Americans to be interested in video game with English Colonies and American Revolution as a setting especially in comparison to Crusades or Renaissance Italy.

What about the French?
Who seem to be absent from this game so far.
I don’t think the historical setting is very important to the largest chunk of their fan-base, I remember when the first was released and a friend of mine in France just said it was a middle-ages action game…

Does that have anything to do with this Americanist portrayal we are discussing?
If you want an Anglicised view (which is not what we are calling for), the Founding fathers were the equivalent of Al Qaeda and John Hancock was a smuggler who got caught (and had a good cry about being oppressed). They also played into the desires of the French under the guise of Freedom (lol).
Nope, everyone is free here, liberty and so on, fuck the slaves and natives.
Are you saying this is not an erroneous Americanist portrayal of events?

your trying to sound too smart on the internet and reading to much into what he said. He was just pointing out a double standard here that tends to lend itself to an anti-american sentiment. . OMG US POOR INNOCENT BRITS DIDN’T DO ANYTHING TO SPUR A REVOLUTIONARY WAR WE WERE JUST MINDING OUR OWN BUSINESS DRINKING TEA AND MAKING BAD PUNS WHEN ALL THE SUDDEN OUR COLONIES REVOLTED AGAINST US FOR NO REASON!!!! I think thats what he was trying to point out quit acting so damn innocent the founders did what they did for a reason but it seems your nationality is blinding you to that fact. Honestly i didn’t realize you Brits still hold a grudge.

Eh?
What grudge were you talking about?
I’m French, not British. Your revolution caused the bankruptcy of my country and threw us into chaos leading to the establishment of a republic. I don’t really hold a grudge for that, maybe the fact that the debt was not repaid and our efforts are almost entirely glossed over but that’s not the issue.
You didn’t read enough into what I said.
Calling this a jingoist pile of crap, full of buzzwords like liberty and freedom doesn’t mean you are of the opinion that the British are innocent. I was just giving the example that in the mind of jingoist Brit, things are very one sided as well. Those people are slated for being ignorant, just like the people who think colonists were being oppressed should be slated.

I’d be interested to see if it really is as morally ambigous as Ubisoft have claimed it to be; my favourite part of their conference was the attempt to mitigate concerns that the British would be the main enemy by showing more footage of the British being the main enemy. I’ve never before seen anyone fail to answer a question they picked themselves, in a scripted performance.

I think they’ll certainly have yank killing in the game, but I get the impression they purposely avoid showing the killing of Americans at all costs. They’re scared of rage, calls for boycotting, nationalistic bitching from their biggest demographic. In otherwords, they don’t trust Americans to be rational and mature about it, and feel they can afford to let the British suck it up, once again. SIGH

If a game’s portrayal of their country affects people so greatly that it prompts mass outrage and boycotting, people might need to step back and reevaluate this practice of aggressive “my country’s number one” patriotism.

To your point, are the British really going “Sigh, I am portrayed negatively in this videogame, guess I’ll have to suck it up!”, or just people like you?

I don’t get this reasoning. AC1 was a total failure was it? AC2 was only popular in Italy right? I think the setting is pretty interesting, and I’m Swedish by the record and should by your logic be completely uninterested in all the AC games. Of course it’s not going to be completely historically accurate, none of the games in the series are. If it is downright historically offensive, that might be a problem, but we don’t know that yet. I’m looking forward to this.

I did like in the conference how they fielded a question on if the English were the enemy and said you would assassinate targets on both side of the war but all their trailers had a complete absence of fighting revolutionaries.

This,
that was the first thing I thought watching that video. The way he jumps onto ~ the end of a branch thinner than his forearm to sneak up on the English soldiers, and it remains completely static. I’d atleast expect a bit of slow to fall off, but that would highlight how stupid an idea the whole tree parkour thing was in the first place.

But if they want an american revolution assassins creed game you kind of have to have it, else people will get bored with lack of things to climb. Honestly there are probably many better places they could have gone.

Can’t say I’m excited for this yet, have to call myself an ex-AC fan now. I enjoyed 1, then 2, then… well, I had hope that Ubisoft would make a fun, challenging, open world assassin video game series out of it. Unfortunately, their trend (much like any big developer’s) has been to ‘cutscene’ it, with increasingly fancy animations but no changes in the gameplay department. There has been so little interesting player interaction in their latest games… will we ever get anywhere with this industry?

Can’t youtube right now but I saw the ship trailer on gametrailers… I couldn’t help but think that would be fucking awesome as a age of sail style game. The waves and sound effects and detail were pretty sweet, would be awesome in context of really sailing vs the arcade shoot fest.

The whole thing looks atrosciously scripted. What’s does riding up to the castle, climbing a tree, wiping out a patrol in front of the walls of the fort and then pursuing a just recently placed enemy around the side have to do with ‘stealth’?

Love the gameplay trailer. Let me see:
Protagonist that makes no sense whatsoever
Rampant nationalism
Hilarious physics fails (tree branches really aren`t that strong, protagonist is able to move through hyperspace. How the fuck do you get somewhere quicker by going down a longer path at a slower rate?)
Awful animations (seriously, when Mass Effect 3 has a better set of canned kill animations than an AssCreed game, there`s a problem)
Oh, have I mentioned that the very concept of this protagonist is a Mary Sue?
And why the fuck is this suddenly in the same verse as The Secret World? Really, British-only Templar?

I have a feeling that the game will start with Connor working with the English troops. 1, because from what I’ve heard it actually starts during the Seven Years War in the 1760s and works it’s way up to the revolution. So hopefully there will be a lot of French troops to kill. And 2, he’s a Mohawk. And the Mohawks were allied with the British forces during the war. Some British general/secret templar is going to burn his village for some reason and send Connor to the American’s side to retaliate.

I just hope Peter Francisco, the Virginia Hercules, is in the game as some sort of unstoppable NPC tank.

I agree to some extent with the people who are upset about EVIL BRITISH and such, but really, this looks to be a very nice game indeed. My only problem gameplay-wise with what I’ve seen so far are the animations. They look alright in and of themselves, but they are (like in all past AC games) very poorly integated with the world and each other. I think this is one of the great problems with having a megastudio like ubisoft; a lot of the component parts of the game are made separately from each other and then assembled.

Other than that, the freerunning seem to be very smoothly implemented with the terrain and such, but we shall see if it holds up when trying to make your own way through the forest rather than following a scripted track like in the trailer.

Overall, this is one of those games that a lot of people are going to hate on principle, but I’ve always had a soft spot for AC. One needs to realize and accept the fact that they were never about stealth, and look at it more like a James Bond simulator.

OMG, they really should’ve simulated the reality, so I could silently but nervously grab those branches for hours, because if I’d slip that’d clearly end in a permadeath self-hanging from a tree. But when I get there, I’ll be careful not to fall from that wooden roof, cause I’d terribly break a leg. I’d just sit on the roof there and plan the action for like days in RT, because there’s like hundreds of them, and just one Connor. So finally, when I get to strike… omg the horse… The horse kicked me, oh man. I’m dead.

***

Ok, here we go again, I thought George would never grow up, man, finally. It’s been twenty years, phew, here’s the fortress again. AW MY GOD, the branches… Ok, take it easy.. Take it easy, no parkour today. My leg still hasn’t healed properly from the last time. [weeks later] Ok, I’m on the roof, let’s see. Well, ok. Where’s the horse? I don’t see the fucking horse this time. If I just lean to th… AW SHIT

AW THE BAYONET
ARGH

Wha.. It pierced the waterskin, I’m ok! I’M OK! Urm..

… Hey guys, how are ya? … Whaddya mean? … No no, I’m just a viewer, a b.. horizon! A horizon viewer, that’s it. And birds! Yes, yes, NO, NO.. No, I’m ok really.. WHERE ARE YOU TAKING ME, AH NOT THE BAYONET, NOO PLEEEASE, I CAN’T WAIT FOR ANOTHER TWENTY YEARS, PUHLEAS *sock*

Fuck! So much realism, it’s thrilling!
They really should’ve made a true 18th century musket/melee combat simulator!!!

This order of fictional assassins can take on a number of people at once. This gameplay OPTION has been present in AC1 to Brotherhood– but wait, STEALTH is too! (though it’s not as complex and as crucial as say, Splinter Cell– hence Post-Internet-Syndrome’s comment)

Alas, we sometimes forget that videos like this are meant to whet our tomahawk murdering appetite. What better way to do so than show this Native Americassassin killing red coats like nobody’s business?

Sidenote:
You seem very angry– maybe take a break and come back when you don’t feel the need to rub asshole all over the place.

Killer wolves, really? I think these guys have watched “The Grey” too much as wolves do not behave like that. Also, the combat looks even fluffier than the combat in the previous games, not impressed. I think I’ll wait for a Steam sale to pick this up, doesn’t seem to be worth the money at the moment.

In what AC game has the protagonist not killed his enemy without disgression? I certainly don’t remember checking if each city guard was a Templar in any of the other games, and I’m pretty sure I killed enough of those guys to depopulate a small country. What made that okay but not killing the Redcoats?

And for all the complaints about stealth, stealth for the most part has always been about the approach in these games. People hear assassin and get visions of ninjas sneaking in and out without a trace, it’s just another word for murder. The assassins in the AC games are terrorists taking out enemy leaders and scaring the pants off enemy soldiers.

For christs sake they run around in white robes and kill people by leaping off of a roof top and stabbing them in the head. They are generally not subtle people and any stealth has mostly been due to being outnumbered.

And I mean talk about unrealistic, so the branches don’t bend due to weight and the ship turns too fast , I’ve got a bigger break with reality how do these people kill thirty guys and then jump off a building without breaking their legs? Oh right a haystack. These are not games about realisim, they are about having power fantasies in an historical setting. You’re either into that or you’re not.

I think the main point is imagine Ubisoft having that cutscene show whatshisname fighting with the British and slaughtering Americans, before pinning down and gutting someone who looks just like George Washington.

What’s that, you can’t imagine it? That’s because it WOULD NEVER HAPPEN IN A THOUSAND BLOODY YEARS!

They’d never expect Americans to cheer as their soldiers were slaughtered for entertainment, so don’t say people are being over-sensitive for bringing it up. And as far as I know, none of the other games have represented actual modern nations; countries like France , Italy etc either didn’t exist in their modern form, or have undergone multiple revolutions since the 1700s, or are otherwise unrecognisable. In Britain there’s a continuity with that period; there are individual regiments that fought in the revolution that still exist, that fought in Iraq, that are still fighting, and dying, in Afghanistan. Those are wars we joined after 9/11, when few other countries gave America anything other than kind words. So yeah, killing British soldiers for fun isn’t quite the same as killing some Florentine city guards.

What do you expect from a French publisher and their crypto-gallic quebecois lackeys anyway, eh ;)

I think you missed my point, which was in what game especially an Assassin’s Creed game do you not kill your enemies with impunity? It doesn’t seem to matter who they are they all just get killed, really they are collections of pixels and not british at all. It seems foolish to me to be upset because this time the pixels look like your people.

And sure to us there’s a difference between a Florentine guard and a British soldier but that’s probably because neither of us is Italian. In fact there were a lot of Italian people who didn’t like how they and their historical figures were represented in AC2.

It’s interesting you bring up Iraq and Afghanistan as I can’t imagine seeing the scores of people killed in AC1 who were depicted in a fashion not so different than how the peoples of those two countries are in most modern media was very comfortable for people of that background.

And I know for a fact that my German friend isn’t exactly a fan of how in tons of games people do nothing but kill scores and score of his people. Sure they were Nazis but most of them were just soldiers and I think it’s safe to say there’s still a continuity with that period. And he can actually understand what they’re screaming when they die in the games.

Everybody’s sensitive when it’s their people who play the part of “The Bad Guys”( Except the russians who seem to like it.) and no it’s unlikely we’ll ever see a game where America is the bad guy and that’s stupid. That doesn’t mean it’s any less silly for us to get our panties in a twist over the generic enemy in a video game looking like us when we didn’t care when it looked like someone else last time.
But then I’m Canadian so I would honestly think it was awesome anyone thought my country was scary enough to be the bad guy in a game.

What puzzles me about AC3 is the whole motivation behind the main character. He’s a Native American right? Native’s liked nor disliked the American’s anymore than they did the British. Both the British and the “revolutionaries” both made deals with Indian tribes and both betrayed them.

Why would any native want to fight for a “free America” when a “free America” was already on course to wiping out the indigenous people of the land. Surely it would have made more sense to make it about him killing white men in general and not just the British.

What’s next from Ubisoft? AC4 : WW2 where you play a rogue Nazi assassin towards the end of WW2 where you team up with the British to kill the Russians despite the fact both of them are bombing the crap out of your country?

The only bit I truly approve of is in the Frontier demo, where the big Highlander casually stops Assassin-Mel-Gibson’s axe and then non-chalantly headbutts him. Seems like something a big angry Scot in the 18th Century would do in that situation.